Commentary

Snap Bows Campus Publisher Stories

Reflecting their shared interest in reaching well-heeled millennials, Snapchat parent Snap is joining forces with a number of big college newspapers to launch Campus Publisher Stories, the tech
platform and visual messaging service announced this week. The
partnership gives student publications an important new channel to reach their core audiences, while Snap gets access to relevant, hyper-local content to drive engagement with its app.

Snap is working with “dozens of colleges and universities, whose editorial teams will begin producing weekly Publisher Stories and distributing them on Snapchat,” the
company revealed. In addition to creating and distributing editorial content, college newspapers will also be able to use Snap to sell “Snap Ads to help each school monetize and grow their
newspaper through a revenue sharing agreement.”

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Campus Publisher Stories is kicking off with new weekly editions featuring highlights of recent coverage from four big college
newspapers: Berkeley’s The Daily Californian, Texas A&M’s The Battalion, Syracuse’s The Daily Orange, and the University of Wisconsin at
Madison’s The Badger Herald.

These Stories will only be accessible to students who have activated location sharing to confirm they are on the campus in question.

According to a report in Poynter, UWM’s Badger Herald has assigned a dedicated Snapchat editor with a team of up to five people to work on the newspaper’s Stories,
which will be updated every Friday.

Snapchat isn’t the only big company interested in working with college newspapers.

British company Tab Media, which launched in 2009
at Cambridge University, is bringing its hybrid local-national news app to American colleges and universities with support from various publishers, including News Corp.

Like the U.K.
operation, Tab Media in the U.S. aims to build a national network of student journalists from college newspapers. They will produce stories of both local and national interest with particular
relevance to millennial readers.

Shortly after launch, Tab Media established outlets at several dozen schools across the U.S., including all the Ivy Leagues. It will add at least 100 more
institutions. Currently, Tab boasts around 10 million unique visitors per month, monetized through ads and sponsored content.